As a minister of the gospel, I should have “stayed in my lane,” stuck to the text, and more vehemently opposed any effort to impose a masking requirement upon the people of God. Such a policy and such an application of the Sixth Commandment was not based on the teaching of Scripture, but based on what the government-approved scientists were saying at that time regarding the “Masking-Preventative-Hypothesis.”

To the beloved congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Fort Oglethorpe:
Three years ago, I made the biggest mistake of my pastoral ministry. At the time, people exhibiting symptoms of a new virus were trickling in to Emergency Rooms in the Chattanooga area. We were told this virus was deadly and dangerous by the media, health experts, and government authorities. I believed them.
These “unprecedented events” would become a great test of the strength of my commitments and my consistency to my guiding principles. It was a test I failed.
I. Worldview
When it was suggested we should suspend the public worship of God for a few weeks I not only agreed to it, but also enabled the suspension of public worship. I was wrong. Although I was motivated by a desire to “do the right thing,” this was undoubtedly the wrong decision and is one the greatest regrets of my life.
This was a worldview failure. A worldview is supposed to help a person make decisions in the absence of all the facts and respond rightly to “unprecedented events.” But I ignored my worldview in March of 2020.
In a Christian Worldview, God is the ultimate reality and the ultimate end (goal) of life is His glory, and a crucial duty of the Christian is to give God the glory He deserves in the context of public worship. But at this time I agreed: the potential for danger was so great, I believed, that even public worship should be shut down.
Although at the time I thought what we were doing was right, in hindsight I see how it reflects a failure to apply my worldview to what I was reading in the news and hearing from other elders both near and far as well as the government authorities. While perhaps there may have been individual situations in which the risk to some people from the new virus was so great their own personal decision to absent themselves from the public worship of God for a season might have been legitimate, it was wrong of me to support suspending God’s public worship for the whole congregation. If the virus was as deadly as we were led to believe, then we needed corporate worship all the more.
I apologize for failing to rightly apply the Scripture to this situation:
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands. (Psa. 63:2–4)
II. Wisdom
During the “Quarantine” closure, I began making a series of videos offering mostly half-baked pastoral reflections on the current unpleasantness. Mercifully, few of you watched them. In (at least) one of these videos, I asserted something along the lines of, “…we know masks work…” because there seemed to be no outbreaks tied to all the tourists coming to the Florida theme parks, which at the time required masking. So I encouraged people, as we resumed public worship, to wear a mask in order to prevent the spread of potential sickness.
This was a wisdom failure. As a trained and credentialed minister of the gospel, I do have a bit of expertise in biblical exegesis, theological matters, and ethical questions. But as to whether a piece of cloth can stop a particle of virus, I am wholly unqualified to give advice. But I used the influence of my position as an officer in the Kingdom of God to encourage the people in this congregation to wear masks. And the basis of my exhortation: it [allegedly] works at Disney World. I apologize for deviating from my expertise and training as a pastor to offer pronouncements on a subject about which I knew nothing.
Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent. (Prov. 17:27–28)
III. Ecclesiology
Eventually the hospitals in Chattanooga did get a bit busy with people exhibiting symptoms of the virus that leaked from a communist lab in Wuhan, China. At that time, the Session chose to no longer simply encourage all God’s worshipers to wear masks, but require everyone worshiping or attending functions at the church to wear a mask. While I personally opposed this as a requirement, I dutifully announced it and explained the reasoning behind the policy.
Perhaps some of you may remember, I went so far as to explain – as I preached through the Decalogue – that the Sixth Commandment was the reason the Session required masking: to prevent the potential loss of life. This was inappropriate.
While I personally disagreed that any Church court has the authority to require masking, as I believe this violates both the liberty of conscience and the limits of church power, I nonetheless shared the Session’s embrace of the “Masking-Preventative-Hypothesis,” and I enabled the Session to transcend what I knew were the limits of its Christ-given authority by reminding people of the policy and urging people to comply with it.
This was a failure of my ecclesiology, my doctrine of the Church.
Read More
Related Posts:

It might seem strange that the confession’s teaching on providence deals mainly with its darker side. Of course, everything the confession says about God’s redemption of humanity could also be considered under the heading of providence. But providence does often rattle our faith. Yes, our heavenly Father providentially cares for his children (Matt. 6:25–34). But sometimes his care feels lacking. How can we make sense of providence when God leaves “his own children to manifold temptations, and the corruption of their own hearts”? 

God “works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11). We study God’s decree—his eternal plan—to grapple with his sovereign foreknowledge. We reflect on God’s providence—his working all things—to appreciate his present involvement in our world. God has not left us to fend for ourselves.
Still, the relation of God’s decree and his ongoing work in this world raises challenging questions. We wonder how providence affects human choices. We struggle to relate providence to human sin. And, if God works all things for the good of the church, why does providence sometimes seem hard even for Christians? We can’t answer all these questions to the satisfaction of our curiosity. We can’t perfectly harmonize Scripture’s teaching on how a good God can be totally in charge of a broken world. But trying to understand God’s work in our world can help us develop more mature trust in him.
How Does God’s Providence Work? (5.1–3, 7)
“God, the great Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things.” The living Word who created everything still “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). Nothing is outside of God’s control. King Nebuchadnezzar learned the hard way that God “Does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’” (Dan. 4:35). The king discovered that “the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will” (32). Truly God is “the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.” To him belongs “eternal dominion” (1 Tim. 6:15–16).
Because God is the “First Cause” of everything, even “second causes” are under his control. God is involved even when his hand is invisible. Nothing can evolve independently or be emancipated from the Creator. God commonly uses means to work his will. Skilled doctors are merely instruments in the great Physician’s hands. But God isn’t bound to means. God can work without means, as when Jesus raised Lazarus with his mere voice (John 11:43–44). God can work above means, as when he provided a son for aged Abraham and barren Sarah. God can work against means, as when he preserved his servants in a fiery furnace (Dan. 3:27).
And God’s providence is not only sovereign, it is also good. He governs according to his perfect “wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy.” No one else has a fraction of the qualifications to unfold world history. And God’s goal is perfect. God’s providence brings him glory and promotes the good of the church. We can’t always see how. But we believe that he will glorify himself (Lev. 10:3) and that, because of his rich love for the church, he will, at the close of history, present her to himself perfect (Eph. 5:25–27).
Read More
Related Posts:

Technocratic pro-natalists often desire to create a certain kind of a child: a healthy child, a smart child, or a “wanted” child. Indeed, with the expansion of embryonic genetic selection technology and the potential of artificial wombs or in vitro gametogenesis—an experimental procedure that genetically modifies anyone’s DNA into viable gametes—parents may use technology to customize their future children. This “Silicon Valley” style of pro-natalism exploits a parent’s desire to raise healthy and happy children by offering them a false promise of control.

My husband and I have one little girl and we are expecting our second child at the end of this year, six weeks before our third wedding anniversary. We represent a growing minority among Generation Z. In 1965, five in six adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four were, or had been, married. Since 1970, however, the marriage rate has fallen by sixty percent. Today, approximately one-third of Gen Z is on track never to marry, with many preferring to remain in unstable cohabitating arrangements. 
What began as a marriage recession has turned into a full-blown birth dearth. In 2023, the birthrate fell to its lowest point of 1.62 births per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The future of the United States, along with that of every developed nation except Israel, is threatened by demographic decline. Our economy, Social Security, military readiness, eldercare, education, and more depend on new generations of children. On an individual level, this decline reflects a much darker reality. Happy, hopeful people have babies. If we are not having babies, what does that say about the health of our nation? 
The causes of this birth dearth are varied: rising infertility among men and women, the atomizing force of technology, the high cost of living and raising children, and the decline in marriage and church attendance. Abortions have increased since the Dobbs ruling—perhaps due to the increased availability of medical abortion—as have intentional sterilizations, especially among younger men and women. Each of these factors, individually and in concert, has resulted in what Tim Carney calls a “family unfriendly” culture where children are seen as impositions or, at best, luxury goods. 
Pro-natalism, a movement against the decline in births, is making headlines as it draws prominent champions like Elon Musk. While we should be pleased by this development, we should distinguish between “mere pro-natalists,” who simply want to see more babies born, and those who prioritize family formation as the basis for increasing birth rates. Mere pro-natalists can serve as excellent allies against our anti-child culture, but the lack of concern for family formation risks perpetuating the very social pathologies that gave rise to the birth dearth in the first place. 
By overlooking the prior decline in mother-father marriage rates, the fertility crisis is reduced to a national collective action problem for someone else to solve. Mere pro-natalism also tends to view children, and their mothers, as means to a greater end: saving the world, the nation, the economy, or finding meaning in one’s life. As the failure of China’s efforts to increase births shows, instrumentalizing motherhood in this way can actually discourage women from childbearing.
Read More
Related Posts: